Wine Industry Members: The TTB is on your side!

When I first began doing wine tracking work at a Sterling Vineyards back in 1997 I was not given any training about the details of it. It was essentially a matter of being in the right place at the right time for the opportunity to begin learning winery compliance, just not when it came to being trained how to do it. So being true to my nature I began to search for wine compliance training materials and opportunities. It was a brief search as there was little to nothing available.

Fast forward a few years and my background had now advanced somewhat from direct, on the job experience and some class offerings I had been able to attend. I was gradually piecing together the pieces of a winery compliance system puzzle. One of the other resources I had begun to access was the TTB’s website. Back then their website was just beginning to offer detailed resources for the industry. Today if you visit their website you will find a wide range of informational materials explaining their regulations, tutorials on their reporting and other relevant topics for understanding their processes and regulations.

One of those helpful informational tutorials is their Common Compliance Issues in a TTB bonded winery audit. This as you might guess covers the most common issues that TTB investigators encounter in the course of doing on site audits at wineries. They break those areas down into four sections; records, inventory, reporting and tax payment & basic permit registration and bond. For each of these sections they break down the details about what is being done incorrectly and how to rectify the problem.

This is what I mean by commenting that the TTB is on the wine industry’s side. They do want wineries to understand how to set up and maintain their compliance systems so that they never are on the receiving end of an audit notice.

For all the details covered in this tutorial here is a link: http://www.ttb.gov/wine/common_compliance_tax_issues.shtml#record_1